Usher Book:

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Editorial Review:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THE PASTORAL LETTERS OF 1894 AND 1904. There are at times utterances which are made with such an appearance of authority by men occupying exalted place in the Church that it seems to be almost a case of speech by the very Church itself. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than the impression thereby produced, for it is hard for the multitude to believe that such men have usurped authority and transcended their proper functions. Never were there two more striking instances of this than the two documents we are now to consider. In 1894 six of the bishops united in a Pastoral Letter which was unprecedented in its tone and character. Whatever may have been the dissensions within the episcopate relative to this letter, it was finally all arranged so that the claim could be fairly and plausibly made that the whole weight and prestige of the House of Bishops was behind it. In the General Convention of 1895 it was moved in the House of Deputies "that this House thanks our Reverend Fathers in God for their Pastoral Letter." This was sought to be amended so that the House should not only express its gratitude but that the Pastoral should be "hereby adopted ex animo as a true and catholic definition upon the doctrines it considered." This amendment was afterwards withdrawn by consent and the original motion was laid on the table. Thus the Deputies did not thank the bishops nor approve their ideas. But the House of Bishops did in express terms declare that "we do now reaffirm a Pastoral Letter dealing chiefly with two of the great fundamental verities of the Christian faith, two truths which underlie Christianity and without which God has not been fully revealed to-man." This having stood for a decade, they issued in 1904 another Pastoral in which they said: " If one finds, whatev...